The spotlight shines this week on legendary film stars Debbie Reynolds, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. Reynolds, who turned 81 on Monday and has a new book coming out, "Unsinkable," came to fame in the 1950s and is still going strong. American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre is celebrating the musical-comedy star with "A Hollywood Life: The Unsinkable Debbie Reynolds" retrospective. It starts Thursday evening with the 1955 romantic comedy "The Tender Trap" with Frank Sinatra and the 1963 comedy "Mary, Mary" with Barry Nelson.

Iconic movie costumes worn by Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe will go up for sale in June from a collection belonging to actress Debbie Reynolds, auction house Profiles in History said Thursday. Monroe's subway dress from "The Seven Year Itch," Judy Garland's blue cotton dress and ruby red slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" and Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" bowler hat are among the 3,500 items up for auction in Beverly Hills on June 18. Barbra Streisand's sleeveless gold velvet, jeweled gown from "Hello, Dolly!"

"Made in Jersey," the new CBS series starring Janet Montgomery as a scrappy, street-smart New Jersey attorney working in a Manhattan law firm, is apparently the first casualty of the fall TV season. The series, which has drawn low ratings since its Sept. 28 premiere, has been pulled from the Friday lineup after just two airings. A network spokesman confirmed Wednesday that the show, which was created by former Los Angeles Times reporter Dana Calvo, had been yanked but gave no further details on when or if it would return to the schedule.

At 79, Debbie Reynolds is unsinkable. She returns to the big screen as dotty Grandma Mazur in the Katherine Heigl comedy "One for the Money," opening Friday, and maintains a busy performing schedule. At her cozy Beverly Hills home, she talked about her famous family and historic Hollywood memorabilia collection, which she partly liquidated in two auctions last year. Who's this? This is Dwight. This is Carrie's dog. I'm the grandma. I'm a grandma in every way. I'm Grandma Mazur, I'm Grandma Reynolds.

A federal bankruptcy judge threw a half nelson on the World Wrestling Federation, raising the price for a hotel the WWF had agreed to buy from movie star Debbie Reynolds. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Clive Jones reopened bidding on the bankrupt resort, saying he was required by law to get the most money possible for the property. The WWF's parent, Stamford, Conn.-based Titan Sports Inc., thought it had bought the hotel-casino at bankruptcy auction Wednesday for $9 million.

The unsinkable Debbie Reynolds has spent decades amassing costumes from the films of Tinseltown's Golden Age. For her dedication to the preservation of film history, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising honored her with its Crystal Star Award on Saturday. Proceeds from the black-tie dinner held on the institute's downtown campus will support a scholarship in her name and the Thalians Mental Heath Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Mary Frances Reynolds is back in the old neighborhood. You know her as Debbie Reynolds, the name given to her when, as a 16-year-old, she was first under studio contract. Talent scouts had spotted her in the Miss Burbank beauty contest, which she'd entered despite being a tomboy whose most distinguishing talent was an ability to lip-sync to Betty Hutton records. For two weeks, Reynolds is performing at El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, just blocks from her old family home in Burbank.

The World Wrestling Federation said Thursday that it has acquired the Debbie Reynolds Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for $10 million at auction, with plans to create a WWF-themed facility based on the popular TV figures whose "wrestling" matches are less sport and more entertainment. "Through our worldwide television network . . . we will promote the World Wrestling Federation Hotel & Casino as well as Las Vegas as nobody else can," said WWF Chairman Vince McMahon.

Gripping the seats in the small, darkened theater, the audience is engrossed in the action on the screen. The room is vibrating, and eyes as wide as gramophones are fixed on the high-definition video. Disneyland's Star Tours? Not quite. . . . Debbie Reynolds' Hollywood Movie Museum. It's a little high-tech for a museum, but this is a Hollywood museum, and it is in Las Vegas. The star-studded opening is tonight--on Reynolds' 63rd birthday.

At 79, Debbie Reynolds is unsinkable. She returns to the big screen as dotty Grandma Mazur in the Katherine Heigl comedy "One for the Money," opening Friday, and maintains a busy performing schedule. At her cozy Beverly Hills home, she talked about her famous family and historic Hollywood memorabilia collection, which she partly liquidated in two auctions last year. Who's this? This is Dwight. This is Carrie's dog. I'm the grandma. I'm a grandma in every way. I'm Grandma Mazur, I'm Grandma Reynolds.

Tracy Morgan had barely finished apologizing for his anti-gay jokes, and now the comedian is in hot water again. In his standup act in New York last weekend, Morgan mocked the mentally disabled, according to the New York Times. This has led to a demand for an apology from the "30 Rock" star by a group promoting the rights of the mentally and physically disabled. Morgan's wisecracks reportedly included a warning not to "mess with women who have retarded kids. " His remarks are "far too offensive to be excused as comedy," Peter Berns, head of the Arc, said earlier this week.

Iconic movie costumes worn by Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe will go up for sale in June from a collection belonging to actress Debbie Reynolds, auction house Profiles in History said Thursday. Monroe's subway dress from "The Seven Year Itch," Judy Garland's blue cotton dress and ruby red slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" and Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" bowler hat are among the 3,500 items up for auction in Beverly Hills on June 18. Barbra Streisand's sleeveless gold velvet, jeweled gown from "Hello, Dolly!"

"M-G-M: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot," a new coffee-table book from Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester and Michael Troyan, offers a nostalgic look at the sound stages and expansive outdoor sets of the famed Culver City studio that boasted of having more stars than are in the heavens. Besides interviews with folks who worked there ? including a foreword by Debbie Reynolds ? the book features hundreds of rare photographs that illustrate MGM's status as the dream factory. According to the authors, it's been estimated that one-fifth of the films made in Hollywood before 1970 were at least partly shot at the studio.

April 24, 1994 | HILARY de VRIES, Hilary de Vries is a frequent contributor to Calendar

"Is something burning?" From the moment Debbie Reynolds pads into her daughter's cathedral-sized living room, carrying a large kitchen knife and sniffing the air, you know you've entered the house of mirth a la Carrie Fisher.

She played the unsinkable Molly Brown on film, but financial problems have conspired to sink Debbie Reynolds and her namesake Las Vegas hotel, which has filed for Bankruptcy Court protection. The filing comes two months after an agreement to sell the 193-room hotel for $16.8 million folded. The Debbie Reynolds Hotel, which is several hundred yards from the famed Las Vegas Strip, remains open, and Reynolds will continue to perform her nightclub act there, a spokesman for Reynolds said.

As Eddie Fisher once put it, by the time he was 33, "I had been married to America's sweetheart and America's femme fatale, and both marriages had ended in scandal. "I'd been one of the most popular singers in America and had given up my career for love. I had fathered two children and adopted two children and rarely saw any of them. I was addicted to methamphetamines and I couldn't sleep at night without a huge dose of Librium. " And looking back over a tumultuous life that included his years with Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor, he wrote in his 1999 memoir, "Been There, Done That," that he had learned one important lesson: "There were no rules for me. I could get away with anything so long as that sound came out of my throat.